Apparently we don't need science...

Home Secretary Alan Johnson clearly feels that, when scientific evidence and governmental policy are at odds, the best way to resolve the issue is to stop people from hearing the science. Hence his sacking of the government's chief drugs advisor, Professor David Nutt, for speaking out against the government's reclassification of cannabis from a Class C to a Class B drug last year, a decision which he and most other experts opposed and which had next to no scientific justification.

I'm not big into the current popular trend of Labour bashing, and I personally believe letting David Cameron anywhere near No. 10 would be a disaster, but it's a sad day when whoever is making the policies feels that the need to pander to ill-informed "public concern" is greater than the need to follow carefully researched scientific consensus. 1 in 5000 males (and 1 in 20,000 females) who smoke bucketloads of cannabis may develop schizophrenia, a condition which has an incidence of 1 in 100 in the normal population anyway. Yet alcohol and cigarettes kill hundreds of thousands a year and cost the NHS millions. If alcohol and cigarettes are treated as an acceptable vice of society, why not cannabis?